"Inside the brand-new museum
there is an old synagogue
Inside the synagogue
is me.”
Yehuda Amichai, Poem Without an End, tr. Chana Bloch
In his work, Petr Franta has always advocated an “all-inclusive” definition of architecture as a field encompassing the landscape and the building, the ground and the core, the exterior and the interior - the urban in the rural. He has endorsed one of the credos of the Czech Cubist architects - the monumentality expressed in an object of vastly varying scales and sizes situated in space.
His career has, in parallel with large scale designs (masterplans, a port and an airport) included a number of innovative exhibitions and art installations, both in Canada, the Czech Republic and elsewhere.
History has been an underlying theme in a number of important projects of recent years, challenging the architect to address particularly demanding issues: those of contributing to the respectful restoration, renewal and interpretation of the “precincts of memory” in architectural terms.
It is not accidental, that Petr Franta has also turned his talents as an architect to some challenging projects in which the complementary issues of historic preservation, documentation, education and preservation of memory are brought to bear on a revitalization of a particularly vulnerable example of cultural heritage in Central Europe - the synagogues. Place, time and circumstances have often not been kind to them and never more than in the first half of the 20th century.
In the post - World War II period, the decimated Czech Jewish communities grieved the loss of their members who had built their synagogues and rabbinical schools to pray, to learn and to debate. The degradation of the synagogue buildings and cemeteries in Bohemia and Moravia had been mostly ignored by the previous regime, except for the commendable efforts in the early 1960s to honour the victims of the Holocaust by painstakingly inscribing their names on the walls of the Pinkas synagogue. The artist Václav Boštík, who together with Jiří John undertook the backbreaking task of lettering close to some 78 000 names of those perished from every Jewish community in the Czech lands, left a fitting description in an unpublished collection of his poems: “words are the bodies of thoughts. Letters are the shadows of words.”
But who were the people behind the names? What happened to them and where? What had been their journey into exile and annihilation? Why should the hundreds of people who come every day to visit the Memorial of Czech and Moravian victims of shoah on their way through to the Old Jewish Cemetery pause here and reflect? There had been earlier efforts by the Jewish Museum to create an interactive content for the exterior part of the Pinkas synagogue, the liminal stretch between private and public, the community and the city. Most notable among these proposals had been a project Three Gates by the outstanding Czech sculptor Aleš Veselý. Unrealized, it took another twenty years to find a simple, but ingenious solution that illustrates at the same time the evolution and expansion of meaning of the synagogue structure as a modern museum.
A new, luminous, outdoors exhibition circuit that Petr Franta realized in 2018 on the grounds of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague represents the most recent didactic addition to the ensemble of historic structures dating back to the 1500s and erected in the footprint of the original prayer hall in a private house situated on the very edge of the Jewish cemetery. To give physical form to the new outdoors exhibition, “Journeys with no Return”, curated by Jana Šplíchalová has been a true test for the architects, particularly given the narrow space left behind by the former Pinkas alley. Their innovative solution perfectly illustrates the challenges of marrying the ground and the theme in a charged historical setting, such as this Memorial to the Czech and Moravian Victims of the Shoah.
The overall space is spare, consisting of the synagogue-adjacent entrance courtyard open from Široká street and the paved Pinkas alley which abuts a see-through door on the south side of the Jewish cemetery.
The courtyard space, once occupied by souvenir stands, has been transformed with the use of a large exhibition case shaped like a glass wedge, a ship’ s prow that invites the visitor to discover the history of the Pinkas synagogue building and its surroundings. The ingenious form of the exhibition case design by Petr Franta reconciles the irregular footprint of the wall separating the synagogue precinct from the street and the south wall of the synagogue itself. The illumination from within that comes on with the night makes the case glow, intriguing and mysterious when viewed from the street, but its daylight purpose is crystal-clear: to bring out the story of the place and its role in the city.
The architectural staging of the Pinkas alley to the west is governed by the core theme of the deportation of Czech and Moravian Jews to the Terezín ghetto and the transports to the extermination camps further East. In exhibition terms it requires a sensitive touch and a space of repose, as the images are often disturbing and the emotional impact can be overwhelming.
Franta has met this brief with the precision, simplicity and clarity that is required in an emotionally charged space such as this. A series of large tempered-glass panels riveted to the historic wall unspools the narrative of the exodus captured in the stark, black-and-white, photographs.
Particularly effective is a small irregular grouping of glass stools that complement the more traditional wall installation and form a miniature open-air learning room, a place to rest, to absorb and to ask questions, alongside it. The subtle integration of Franta’s design in the grand symbolism of the surrounding buildings is a real tour-de-force.
The last to be built in central Prague during the Emancipation Period, the Spanish Synagogue occupies the ground of a much earlier structure known as the Old Schul, that had served the first Jewish settlers. For five hundred years, the efforts to expand and revive the medieval building so as to accommodate a growing congregation followed the ebb and flow of both human and architectural destruction and renewal. Ultimately, it was the introduction, in the 1830s, of Reform services that had provided an impetus to erect a wholly new building in the place of the knotty historic layers of the Old Schul, demolished in 1867. Designed in a Byzantine style by the architects Ignác Ullmann and Josef Niklas and featuring a richly decorative ‘Moorish’ interior, the new building acquired the epithet ‘Spanish‘ derived largely from its distinctive visual features. The striking late 19th century building eventually saw a handsome functionalist structure added to it by the interwar architect Karel Pecánek in 1935, providing a vestibule entrance on the ground floor and simultaneously supporting, on the upper floor, the women’s gallery as well as the so called Winter synagogue, or prayer hall.
Like the majority of Prague synagogues situated in the quarter, the Spanish synagogue, too, gradually assumed a mantle of a museum exploring the history and culture of the Jewish Community since the Emancipation. Under the umbrella theme “ Jews in the Bohemian Lands, 19th - 20th centuries”, it has focused on the modern, rather than ancient history as reflected in the objects from the collections of the Jewish Museum. Nevertheless, the need to refresh, technologically upgrade and environmentally protect the artefacts on display made it imperative that the Museum introduce further adjustments to the interior of the synagogue itself, accompanied by an entire transformation of not just the exhibition cases but also their digital complements in a seamless and interactive form.
Petr Franta’ s engagement with the project began in 2018, once the overall museum brief articulated varying forms of intervention on a broad scale. Among the major tasks to undertake had been the expansion of an overall exhibition space on the two floors to a total of 600m2; a complete reconstruction of the museum shop and its equipment; and an easy and flexible system of additional seating, for a range of public events. Petr Franta and his team undertook a purpose-built design of curved glass-and-steel exhibition cases 250 cm high, with a built-in environmental control, surround LED lighting and a possibility of installing large objects from the top down; interactive built-in digital kiosks with a bench seat that complemented discrete areas of the exhibition itinerary; and a seamless transition toward the upper-floor continuation of the exhibit and the modest space of the Winter prayer hall with an innovative system of wall-based and free-standing screens showing a selection of important community events from the more recent past.
Intervening, however purposefully, in a listed building, furthermore one that, as the heart of Old Town, is recognized as part of the UNESCO heritage, is a hugely demanding and delicate task. It is a tribute to the synergy of the Jewish Museum, its curators as well as conservators of the Heritage Department and the Architects who together carried out the overall brief that the quality of the achievement has been singled out as one of the recipients of Gloria Musaealis, 2020. Never before had the public access to the Spanish synagogue offered visitors’ experience that had been so compelling, educational and vivid in portraying the contributions of the Jewish community to every aspect of civic life, ranging from industrial and commercial development, through scientific inventions, to the intellectual and cultural flowering, all in a two-hundred-year period before World War II. The overall impression is that of a new life and transparency in a brilliantly restored and enhanced building.
Both synagogues and museums are communal spaces, yet the precious essence of any such space is irreducably personal. So is the story told in the new exhibitions designed by Petr Franta inside the Spanish and on the grounds of the Pinkas Synagogues. These two signature projects had been preceded by the architect´s contributions to the exhibition design, restoration and renewal of a small, but important, group of country synagogues in the care Federation of Jewish Communities: Rychnov, Polná, Police and Jičín.